Yoast SEO WordPress Tutorial [Proper Step-by-Step Settings]

Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress which have the potential to sky rocket your blog traffic. Not only it will configure your blog for SEO but also guide you to write SEO friendly posts and pages.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and configure Yoast SEO with proper settings to get the most out of it.

The guide below has been written for absolute beginners to provide basic understanding of the plugin settings and how to use Yoast SEO according to your WordPress blog configuration.

What is Yoast SEO?

Yoast SEO will enable two functions on your blog:

Site-wide SEO settings

These settings will let you configure your site for search engines visibility. The steps generally include setting up titles, your blog’s social profiles, XML sitemap and related settings.

These settings usually set for once and then forget about it.

On-Page SEO settings

The second function includes optimizing your posts and pages for search engines. Yoast will help you in writing SEO friendly posts by guiding you good SEO practices which may include choosing the right keywords, title suggestions, post readability and other related suggestions.

These settings will appear on your posts page while writing new posts.

Here is a list which we will discuss thoroughly.

Features Settings

Titles & Metas

Setting up Social Profiles

Setting up XML Sitemap

Yoast SEO Advance Settings

Tools

It’s always a good idea to take a complete backup of your blog and database before making site-level changes.

How to install Yoast SEO plugin?

The plugin settings will be available under SEO menu item on the main dashboard.

Yoast SEO Dashboard

Although Yoast Dashboard doesn’t have any settings to configure but it will list any serious SEO problems found on your blog. It will also show you important notifications from time to time. Give this place a visit once a week otherwise you are good to go.

General

Let’s proceed to General tab now. Yoast SEO recently added a Configuration wizard which will help you to configure most of the settings step-by-step all in one place.

Press Open the configuration wizard button.

On the first setup screen, you have the option to either do it yourself or use Yoast configuration service. Obviously we will go for the first option Configure Yoast SEO in few steps.

Under Environment, choose the appropriate option. If you are installing Yoast SEO on a live site, choose Production otherwise choose Staging or Development.

Define your site type in the next screen.

Next, you have to configure your website if it is representing a person or a company. It will be registered as metadata in your website to appear in Google.

Fill in all social profiles representing you or your company.

Here is an example of how Google shows social profiles in search results:

In the Post type visibility settings, leave all options as it is. The posts and pages options should be visible so search engines can crawl and index your website content.

If your website has multiple authors, set the options here.

Yoast SEO has a feature to fetch useful information from Google Search Console, the step is optional and depends upon user discretion. It doesn’t bring any SEO value whatsoever.

In the Title settings, write your website name and choose a separator. It will show up in search results accordingly.

Here is an example how the title will look like in search engines:

You can either skip or fill in rest of the steps as they are related to sign up for Yoast SEO newsletter and other information.

You are done with most of the plugin settings but still, some more options need to be reviewed so let’s move on.

Features

Yoast SEO Features page displays the options which can be switched on or off for your whole WordPress site.

Let’s review each option quickly.

Readability analysis

Yoast plugin has its own metabox to show readability suggestions while writing a post.

There is no reason to disable it but if you still want to disable this feature, do it here.

Keyword analysis

Keyword analysis is another great feature from Yoast and needs to be enabled. It will analyze keywords while writing a post and give you suggestions accordingly. It will appear in the same metabox as of readability analysis.

Advanced settings pages

Enabling advanced settings will reveal more features under SEO main menu. These are mostly related to site-wide settings to configure titles, meta descriptions, sitemaps and related info. We will discuss most of the stuff later in this tutorial. Keep it enabled.

Ryte

The service will let you know if there are any search engines related indexing issues on your website. Leave it enabled.

Admin bar menu

Yoast plugin installation comes with a tiny button appeared on your admin bar. The button can be useful to quickly jump to Yoast menu items.

Cornerstone content

Cornerstone content is basically those articles which you really want to rank in search engines like Google because these articles accurately represent you or your company.

If this option is enabled, you can set cornerstone content option from Yoast SEO metabox while writing your post.

Once you enable cornerstone content checkbox option, Yoast will let you further improve your post by checking internal linking, keywords etc, however, most of the features will only come with Yoast Premium version.

Text link counter

This feature will let you improve interlinking within your posts.

Interlinking is a practice to insert text links in your posts referring to other articles of your blog.

Woopoo's Tip

Company info

Company info page will let you define your website as a person or a company. If you have already set these options in configuration wizard then you don’t need to touch anything here otherwise fill in the details accordingly.

Webmaster tools

If your website is already verified with all of the above tools, you can skip this step otherwise fill in the respective ids to let webmaster tools verify your site. You need to make an account for each of these services to get your id.

Yoast SEO Advanced Settings

Advanced menu item deals with breadcrumbs, permalinks, and RSS.

Breadcrumbs

Although breadcrumbs is a great feature to have on your blog but it can break your website look if there will be a conflict with your theme settings. It is better to check for the compatibility first or leave it disabled.

Permalinks

First of all, don’t confuse Yoast permalinks with WordPress permalinks.

WordPress permalinks define your blog’s URL structure while Yoast permalinks settings will merely try to improve them by cleaning up stopwords from the slug or redirecting URLs under certain conditions.

Under Clean up permalinks, the default setting is set to Remove stop words in slugs which you can set to Keep if you don’t want Yoast to touch your slugs.

It is better to set it to Keep and manually remove stop words as it will give you more control.

In a URL like Best settings in Yoast SEO, “in” is a stop word which can be taken out to shorten the slug.

Woopoo's Good Practice

Yoast SEO Useful Tools

Yoast SEO tools is a collection of utilities to help you configure SEO settings faster. It includes a bulk editor, file editor, and import/export settings.

Bulk editor

Bulk editor will really help you out when you have a lot of posts and pages and you want to set their tiles and meta descriptions. Instead of manually going inside each post and set it there, this option will let you bulk change titles and meta descriptions for all of your posts and pages.

File editor

File editor will let you add or delete any values from robots.txt or .htaccess file. If you don’t know what you are doing, it’s better not to make any changes in these files because it could break your site.